Filling Some Very Big Shoes

By BARBARA STEWART

Published: June 25, 1995

NEWARK—
IT was closing time on a March afternoon in a Montclair post office when Christopher Green, a debt-ridden laborer who once dreamed of wearing a police uniform, shot and killed four people and seriously wounded a fifth.

Because the crime occurred in a post office, it was a Federal case and fell to the lot of Faith S. Hochberg, who last year became the United States Attorney of New Jersey. In many ways, it was her most important proving ground, and in the view of most colleagues, she passed with flying colors. But the public reaction was more critical.

Ms. Hochberg's first decision was to accept a guilty plea and not to seek the death penalty. That disappointed some of the public and some of the victims' families, but it was part of her considered strategy.

"Faith looks at litigations like a chess match," said Lance Cassak, a lawyer for the Federal Treasury Department in Jersey City, where Ms. Hochberg once worked. "She is good at seeing five, six, seven moves into the game. She's good at assessing somebody's Achilles' heel."

She also, according to relatives of the victims, pursued the case with a heart, showing sensitivity to their grief. "She came to the hospital several times," said Karin Abarbanel, whose husband David was wounded by Mr. Green and may face years of rehabilitation. "She really expressed a lot of concern and sadness, her own personal sense of distress about this terrible crime."

Ms. Hochberg, who is 45, inherited such convoluted and widely publicized Federal cases as the corruption investigation of Newark's Mayor Sharpe James and Edward (Crazy Eddie) Antar, whose conviction for fraud was overturned. She had been an assistant United States attorney for only four years, far less time than Mr. Chertoff spent at the job.

Though she is relatively inexperienced in the ways of the Federal prosecutor's office, she gets high marks from many other lawyers -- even from her natural adversaries, defense attorneys.

"She is an incisive lawyer yet extraordinarily reasonable," said Joseph A. Hayden, a Weehawken defense lawyer and founder of the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "She'll debate with you on any topic. I like the idea I can pick the phone up and vent. Most of the time she won't agree with you, but she'll listen to you -- and that's all you can ask of a U.S. Attorney."

It's true no lawyer of sense would publicly criticize such a powerful colleague. But many defense attorneys, offered anonymity for candor, continued to use phrases like "a no-nonsense prosecutor but fair" or "a very smart person with good common sense and political instincts."

In the Green case, Ms. Hochberg said, she would have sought the death penalty, but the Federal statute allows execution of killers only if they have prior criminal records or torture their victims. Mr. Green's record was clean. Ms. Hochberg decided a death penalty would have eventually been overturned.

"It would have been the same conclusion after a whole long trial," she said. "This way there is no very long emotional roller coaster for the families, where the crime stays alive, memories are refreshed, lives are on hold until the case is settled."

If there was even a remote possibility he'd be executed, Mr. Green's defenders said, Mr. Green would not have admitted guilt.

Forgoing the death penalty in this notorious case was "tremendously courageous," said David Ruhnke, one of Mr. Green's defense lawyers. "She took a lot of heat for it. It would have been an easy decision to go ahead and stretch, really stretch, the statute to cover the situation. It took a lot of intellectual honesty to reach the correct decision."

Ted Wells, with whom Ms. Hochberg worked at Lowenstein, Sandler, said of her role: "The death penalty played a huge role in this case. It gave her extra leverage -- it gave her an extra queen. It permitted her to negotiate a life sentence without parole."

Ms. Hochberg spent hours with families of the victims. "That's unusual for the U.S. attorney who's running an office," Mr. Wells said. "It showed great sensitivity."

Ms. Hochberg said, "You've got to hear the voices of victims. Too many years, criminal and trials focused on crime without appreciating victims. There isn't anybody who doesn't know somebody who's been victimized by crime. The horror of this one will never be gone. I felt for them immensely."

However haunting the crimes she deals with daily, the life of Ms. Hochberg seems to have been touched by gold, by good fortune well used. A top student at Nutley High School, she graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was editor of the Law Review. Her childhood seemed conventional enough. Her father went to work (developing radar for the Defense Department) and her mother stayed home caring for the four children. But despite appearances, she said, "there were singular ways in my house."

Her mother, a brilliant mathematician, mother grew restless as a hausfrau and became a computer scientist.